Who's the Boogieman Now?
by PaBurke
Summary: Challenge:  Gen, any season.  Sam and De-aged Dean are in a store when it gets robbed. The police are called and it turns into a hostage situation. of Hoodie-time prompts.
1. Chapter 1

Who's the Boogieman Now?

By PaBurke

Summary/Challenge: Gen, any season. Sam and De-aged Dean are in a store when it gets robbed. The police are called and it turns into a hostage situation. Pg 5 of Hoodie-time prompts.

Fandoms: SPN (season 2ish), Criminal Minds (season 4ish). Consider CM merely an outsider POV.

Disclaimer: None of the pretties belong to me

*****cm*spn*

"_I need to find my brother!" _

FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Hotchner wasn't surprised to see the brother/guardian of the kidnapped boy at the end of his rope. The brother was tall, even taller than Reid, with shoulders like Morgan. He's a very capable man and that's only reinforced by the fact that he –not the cop- spoted Hotch and his team first. Hotch was genuinely surprised that the PD had managed to keep the man in one place and not out looking for his brother himself. The cops had had to have distracted him for well over an hour waiting for the FBI –Hotch's BAU Team- to arrive.

Rossi and Morgan both noticed the brother's awareness and send a look to Hotch to check that he did too. "Interview the brother," Hotch ordered. "JJ, Prentiss, Reid, interview all of the other witnesses. Garcia?" he called to his computer tech.

"I'm ready and waiting," he could her voice in his earpiece. She would be there for most of the next forty-eight hours. She'd stay in her office gathering all the information available on the internet.

"Any luck catching our guy on the traffic cameras?"

"No Bossman," she was regretful. "You know this slime, he knows were all of them are at before hand. He might not have planned on using the kid –and that is one cute child- as a hostage, but he planned the robbery very well. There's something odd about the video. It looks like our ski mask villain originally wanted to take a very pretty female teen, but somehow decided that an eight-year-old boy would be less trouble. You gotta see this."

"I will." When he had a moment. "What about local businesses? Any of them have video feeds?"

"I'm checking."

"Let me know when you find something."

"On it."

Hotch turned his attention to Rossi and Morgan who were trying to calm down the brother and at the same time, pull every scrap of information out of him.

"How do you think your brother will react?" Rossi asked, playing the 'unconcerned cop.'

The brother smirked and for the first time relaxed. "Ever see Dennis the Menace or Calvin and Hobbes?"

"Yeah…" Morgan drawled out, seeing where this was going. "A creative, active kid."

The brother's laugh was just of this side of hysterical. "That's the nice way of putting it. He's way too smart for his own good." He breathed and it was a broken cry. "He saw his mother die when he was four and Dad pushed him out of the way of an out-of-control semi and…" Rossi and Morgan could see this man who had mourned for his own family pull it together yet again for the living. "The only way I could keep him going was to guilt him into it. I told him that if he died young that he'd dishonor their memory. He had quit talking, quit eating," he was begging the men to understand blatant emotional manipulation.

Hotch did understand. He had a son who had suffered too. This man's younger brother was his son in everything but blood. "So he'll do anything to survive," Hotch told the young man.

He nodded. "Anything, but he'll be smart about it." He bobbed his head to the side to qualify, "mostly."

Considering that they were discussing an eight year old, 'smart' could be relative. "He'll also contact you at his first opportunity," Hotch profiled.

The brother considered lying, but eventually nodded again. "Yeah. He will."

"We'll put a trace on your phone so that we'll be able to back-trace his location sooner."

The brother nodded again. He didn't like it for some reason; probably had a rap sheet of his own, but right now he didn't care what the Feds did as long as they returned his brother. "Any chance that this is personal?" Hotch had to ask. "That this was about you?"

"No," the brother dismissed. "My enemies would have shown their face to me. They wouldn't have hid. And any that would have hid would have been goaded into saying something revealing when I was yelling at him."

Hotch really wanted to get his hands on the internal security tape and hear that conversation. In the meantime, he accepted the brother's testimony as truth and waved to Rossi and Morgan to continue their interview. Hotch stepped well out of hearing and tapped his Bluetooth ear bud.

"Yes Hotch?" She had to be truly distracted if she didn't have some smart greeting.

"I want you to be aware of Sam Wesson's phone every second. The kidnapped boy, Dean, will try to call it the first chance he gets. Also Wesson will probably not tell us if it happens. So I want you tracking his GPS. The second Wesson steps outside of the precinct, I want to know about it."

"Consider yourself informed."

"Good. Now…"

"No boss. Wesson got a text a minute ago and it was all numbers and Wesson's phone is now outside of the precinct."

Hotch whirled around and grabbed Morgan, since he was closer. "Where's Wesson?"

Morgan blinked. "Bathroom. Wanted to wash his face."

Hotch ran for the bathroom and the exit right next to it. "Garcia, where is he now?" he asked the woman with access to all the computers.

"Heading north on South Street. East on Hampton."

Hotch pushed a local cop into his black-n-white and repeated the directions to him. Thankfully, the cop had enough experience not to quibble. He just drove.

"North on 11, East on Willow. Hotch! He's stopped!"

The local cop pulled to the side of the road behind a behemoth black car. Hotch was vaguely aware of multiple black SUVs and black-n-whites following behind. In no time, they found the money from the bakery, diamonds from the jewelry heist of last week and a wall of flat screen TVs from the week before. Around the corner, they saw Sam his arms wrapped around Dean.

The UnSub was in the corner… crying more than the boy. He had an obviously broken leg and was tied to a chair. He was bruised. Sam looked furious, like he was about to kill the man.

Hotch stepped in his path and said, "Let's get Dean outside."

Sam thought about it and then nodded shortly. Dean tried to walk, but limped badly. Sam swung him up in his arms. Considering that he was eight, he should be too big, it should have been awkward, and instead he looked younger in Sam's arms. Sam was big and Dean was small for his age. Dean's arms waved around as he recounted his story for his brother. He had dried tears on his cheeks but he had obviously moved past that.

"He's afraid of the boogieman," Dean sniffed at the UnSub. The sniff was one part distain and two parts remnant fear.

"Most people are," Sam reminded him.

"Boogie's not that bad, he's just got a bad rep. He came when he was called." In Hotch's head he heard '_Hobbs is a tiger but he thinks that humans taste nasty_.'

"Well, he deserves everything Boogie did to him," Sam told Dean.

"Yeah," Dean sent another glare the UnSub's way. Rossi and the local cops had finally untied him from Dean's restraints had handcuffed him to a gurney. The UnSub would have to go to the hospital before lock-up. Hotch overheard the paramedics say that he had a broken collarbone, two broken ribs and a broken leg. The UnSub swore that the 'demon child' had somehow broken his limbs. Hotch wanted to know how and then he would teach his son, Jack, to do the same.

Dean continued talking. "But he wanted to hurt that pretty girl in the bakery and he didn't get hurt enough. I know," Dean bounced in his brother's arms; sure that Sam would never let him fall. "Let's tell Ellen he kidnapped me. She'll kick his ass!"

"Language," said Sam. Hotch didn't think he had ever heard a more cheerful reprimand.

Dean wrapped his arms around his brother, clearly trying to manipulate him. "Thanks for showing up in the nick of time, bitch."

Sam winced and looked delighted and horrified all at the same time. Dean obviously would recover. In comparison to all the other horrors in his life, this –manipulating an UnSub on the verge of a psychotic break to take him instead of a very pretty, shapely fourteen-year-old girl- was barely a blip on the child's radar.

Hotch saw how tightly Sam held his brother, how he was refusing to let the child walk because of the sprained ankle.

It would take Sam longer to recover.

*****cm*spn*


	2. Chapter 2

Boogie Snippet

When Morgan walked into Hotch's office Monday morning, that last thing he expected to see was his boss with a cast on his arm. "Whoa. When Director Strauss said that you turned down a case this weekend, she didn't say that you had visited the ER."

Hotch glanced up with that long-suffering look. "This happened after."

"Tell me that the other guy got the worse end of the fight," Morgan teased as he threw himself into one of Hotch's visitor chairs.

"The other guy was Dean Wesson."

Wesson, Wesson. It took Morgan a few moments to place the name. "Wait a minute. That's the kid who was taken in a bakery robbery and the UnSub ended up with several broken bones. I always assumed that the big brother made that happen just before we got there and the UnSub was scared enough of _him_ to blame the kid."

"No. It was Dean. I had invited Sam and Dean to my place to teach Jack to defend himself. I finally happened upon the means of payment that they'd accept. Dean spent the weekend teaching. I was Dean's 'attacker' and Sam was Jack's."

Morgan leaned forward with interest. "How did my boy do?"

Hotch shrugged and looked smug. "Sam has a broken collarbone."


	3. Chapter 3

For selkieashore123, who wanted a story of how little Dean and Boogie first met/became friends and, odd for me, this became a story about Sam.

Word Count: 400

*spn*

When Bobby's phone rang with Sam's number, he answered it immediately. Last he heard, Dean was still six years old with no way to return to his real age. "Singer."

"It's me," Sam answered.

Bobby could hear the panic in his voice. "What now?"

"Dean… he, I don't know."

"Spit it out."

"He might have befriended the Boogie monster."

Bobby stalled on the thought, then a chuckle slipped out.

"Bobby, this is serious."

"You said 'befriended'," Bobby reminded him.

"I told him to make friends, but with kids his age."

"Which age," Bobby shot back.

"Yeah, Dean said that too. He might have been born twenty-six years ago, but now mentally, physically, he's six. He should make friends with other six year olds."

"How'd he get mixed up with the monster?"

"I think he tried to make friends and one mentioned the monster in the closet. Dean decided to take care of it himself… and he ended up playing poker with it."

"What are the stakes?"

"M&Ms."

That was harmless enough. "You think they're friends?"

"The monster tried to shove Dean behind it for safety when I saw them together. Very protective."

Bobby chuckled again. Sam would have been a threat at that point.

"Not funny. What if it decides Dean is better as a snack than as a friend? How do I get rid of it?"

"I'm thinking. I'm reminded of another frantic phone call. When you were six."

"I never made friends with anything like that."

"Remember Fred?"

"I don't know any Fred." He paused. "Wait, you mean my imaginary friend when I was six?"

"Yes."

"It was an imaginary horse."

"It was the Headless Horseman's horse."

"You're shitting me."

"Kid you not. Dean was sure of its origin, but less sure of its danger level. He never said how he chased it away and I know he never told John. He didn't kill it because you were fond of the ugly beast. This sounds like typical Winchester kid shenanigans. I'll take care of paperwork and schools –Dean is registered here, by the way, if he's still six in the fall- but you are going to have to take care of his friends."

Sam hung up and Bobby laughed and laughed. If Dean –at ten- could chase off a ghost horse, Sam –as a full adult and experienced Hunter- should be able to chase off the boogie monster.


End file.
